EdTraveler

Tuesday, October 7, 2014

Charter
proponents such as the Thomas Fordham Institute and others often cite rhetoric
about charters being less expensive. The facts presented in this report suggest
something quite different.The
reality is that total costs to a community for the same total number of
students rises, quite substantially, when charter schools open.When charter proponents try to argue
that charter schools cost less, they are using very selective figures
concerning where the costs lie. This report will take you step-by-step
through the impact of charter schools on the fiscal health of a school system.

How Are Charter
School Funding Formulas Determined?

In
a somewhat simplified example, take an entire school system's spending, and
divide this amount by the number of students in the district. Multiplying the
number of students in each charter school by this "per-pupil" amount,
minus perhaps a small percentage for overhead costs incurred by the district
responsible for the charter, determines that school's funding. Is this
valid?Let's see how it plays out
in practice. Keep in mind that this "per-pupil" amount is not the
actual dollar amount spent on each student. It is an average amount, only. You
will see why understanding this is important.

A school system's costs includes those
of central administration functions, most of which are related to costly mandates
from state and federal governments. The costs include requirements under No
Child Left Behind (NCLB) policies that even the U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan now admits are failures. The
extensive, and expensive costs of evaluating and meeting the specific needs of
students qualifying for special services under the Individuals with
Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), and the costs of programs to educate
homeless children and those of migrant workers are also very costly, on a per
student basis. State and Federal dollars dedicated to these programs do not
cover all of the costs.

The
costs of specialized programs for students identified under IDEA seem, and
often are, very expensive, yet you should consider two factors.If you are the parent of such a child,
you know how important these specialized programs can be in the quality of life
and in the education of your child. If you don't think it is financially
prudent to spend the money necessary to meet the needs of a child with severe
challenges, you might take heart in knowing that such specialized education
pays large economic dividends to the community. In the not so distant past,
children who now are educated to the level of being able to care for
themselves, and to work in and benefit our communities in so many ways, and
even to pay taxes, were instead placed in public institutions where the costs of
supporting them in sometimes horrid facilities was vastly more expensive than
the "costly" education they now receive.

Charter
supporters will sometimes point to research by other charter supporters that suggests
that, on average, charter schools in a certain location have a similar percent
of students qualifying for these specialized programs.What is missing from their calculations
is the startling reality that the qualifying students in charters often have
very mild challenges (requiring fewer compensating services) compared to those
remaining within the regular public schools. And overall, the claims fall short
of meeting the "veritas" standard anyway, since in most places
charters have far fewer students having Individualized Education Plans (IEPs)
than the surrounding traditional public schools.

In
addition to costly functions mandated by law we also find in the budgets of
most school districts expenses known by accountants as "legacy
costs."These costs include
debts already incurred by the district, but not yet paid, such as the cost of
providing mandated health benefits to retirees and the costs of prior construction
and renovations to be paid in upcoming years. These costs are real, and ongoing.
When charters are not required to cover any of these costs (the argument by
charter supporters being that charters did not "cause" these costs)
then the per-pupil funding is improperly inflated. Why?These very real legacy costs are to
fund past costs to a district. When charter schools do not contribute to the
payment of these just "pre-charter" debts, the remaining debt is then
heaped upon those remaining in the regular public schools.

There Are No Savings Realized When Students Enroll in a
Charter School.

What
about the claim promulgated by charter school advocates that the public schools
save money when charters open? "You are paying us less than what it costs
to educate students in your school district, therefore you are saving money
each time a charter opens!"If only this were true, then there would not be quite as many public school
closures and school programs cut across the nation due to the impact of
charters. Let's play out a very real scenario.

Let
us take a moment to examine what really happens to "per-pupil"
funding in a district when it reaches the public school level. The central
administrative costs of the district are first removed, the "legacy
costs" are removed, and in Louisiana, the costs of transportation for all
students living a mile or more from school are removed from the funding
actually making it to schools. In Louisiana it is also required that public
school systems provide transportation to certain private and parochial schools.
These funds are also removed from what is ultimately available to fund the
education of students in the schools. Per-pupil funding available for the
school itself is obviously less than the system wide "per-pupil"
funding used to determine charter school funding. For the sake of our example
below, we will use an average amount of $7,500 available at the school level to
fund the education for each child.

Imagine
a charter school opening in your community. Imagine that the new school opens
with 100 students the first year.These
students are drawn from applicants applying from ten area schools, from grades
one through five. Now, imagine the district is sending $1,000,000 to the new
school for the first year.This
would be the district level per-pupil amount of $10,000 per student. Each of
the ten "sending" schools is losing ten students, evenly distributed
across first through fifth grade. That would then mean, that each school is
losing two students from each grade. Your child's school loses the school-level
funding for each of these charter students, and now it is necessary to cut the
school budget by $7,500 for each charter school student. Please explain where
in the school these "savings" are realized?With ten students leaving, two from each grade… the school
loses $75,000 per year.If you are the principal, where do you
save $50,000?In the second grade
you have 26 students in each of three classes.You lose two students in this grade to a charter.You now have two classes of 25 and one
of 26 students. Can you cut a teacher to save money?How?Did you
stop heating the classrooms, or cut the hours of the librarian, or the counselor?There are not, in reality, even
marginal savings for the school, unless you impact the services of your remaining
students, often in drastic ways. To save the money necessary you would have to
cut something… but what?If a charter
group takes over a school, an entire school, with all of the students in that
school, then there would be "some" savings to a district. However…
the impact of legacy costs now shared by fewer students, often negates any
savings even in that unlikely circumstance.The fact is, that "savings" due to charter schools
are a huge myth!

Worth noting in this examination of the impact of charter school on the
local school districts is the additional revenues most charter schools
acquire through a variety of funding sources.Start-up funding for charters is often significant, and
comes from state and federal education funds allocated specifically for
charters, and from private foundations pushing the privatization of public
education.While charter school
supporters often scoff at the amount of such start up funds, compared to the
costs of starting a new school, the evidence is clear that the charters are
often "showing a profit" with a few short years.Illinois charter supporters, for
example, point out that charters in Illinois are required to be
"non-profit" schools, but the history of charters across the country
points to charter school "management" companies who are claiming, or
promising, quite healthy profits to their investors. In addition, local
organizations and or wealthy individuals and foundations such as the Bill and
Melinda Gates Foundation and the Eli Broad Foundation are funneling
increasingly lucrative grants to charter schools. Might these funds otherwise
accrue to the benefit of all students?

Finally,
while not the specific topic of this post, the achievement of students in
charter schools should be noted. The CREDO Charter
School Study, which looked at charters in 16 states found rather dismal
effects overall compared to the promises made by charter proponents.First, only 17% of the schools in the
study showed academic performance in charters to be higher than for similar
students in traditional public schools.For 37% of the schools, educational achievement was significantly lower
than for traditional public schools.For the remainder, the achievement in charters was the same as that of regular
public schools.This does not
sound like the vastly superior education claimed by proponents of charter
schools. For charters in Chicago, Illinois, for example, the improvement in
reading was .02 standard deviations above the performance of similar students
in the traditional public schools… and for mathematics achievement there was no
difference.Not exactly setting
the world on fire.

Also
to be noted are the findings of the University
of Minnesota Law School's Center for Race and Poverty Study of the New
Orleans schools, often cited as a bright and shining star example for charters.
In this study the researchers disclosed a variety of methods by which charter
operators sought to increase the likelihood of "creaming" the best
students.

All
in all, charters are costly, they are more likely to decrease student
achievement than increase it, and they drain resources from public school
systems across the country.They
are a way to "select" out of the community challenge of educating all
students by focusing on the Balkanization of the public school systems in
America. The "savings" proclaimed by charter school advocates are
just another piece of "myth-information" designed to promote further
privatization of our nation's public schools.

Copyright
2014, all rights reserved by Noel Hammatt. Permission is granted to share this entire post in written or digital form as long as this copyright notice is included.

Tuesday, September 24, 2013

Governor Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, along with his hand
picked Superintendent of Education, John White, and Republican leaders across
the nation have sold the American people a false bill of goods.

On August 23rd the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) filed a
Memorandum in a school desegregation case involving Louisiana. Jindal seized upon this Memorandum to regain some national attention (his statewide approval ratings are among the lowest of any governor in the US.) by purposely misreading the filing from the DOJ. Jindal, John White and national Republican
leaders would have you and I believe that the feds
came and stood in the doorways of private and religious voucher schools, blocking
entry to poor, minority students.

But this is far from the truth. Superintendent John White first drew the ire of DOJ by refusing to
provide data on more than 1300 Louisiana students receiving vouchers, after he
had already failed to ask for court permission for changes in student
assignments in districts under active desegregation Court Orders, something districts
under desegregation orders are required to do. Why did White not provide the data to the U.S. Department of
Justice, especially when Louisiana voucher laws specifically require the State
Department of Education to ensure compliance with Desegregation Orders? Would
this data confirm the DOJ's worst suspicions?Who knows? White has yet to release any researchable data on the voucher recipients.

What does this volatile DOJ Memorandum actually say? "At this time the United States is not asking that this Court
enjoin the State from awarding any school vouchers."Perhaps Jindal and White missed that
statement since it was "buried" at the top of the second page of the filing. The Memorandum goes on to ask that no
future vouchers be awarded "unless and until" Louisiana "obtains
authorization from the Federal Courts" and further asks the Court to
direct the State of Louisiana to analyze voucher awards to determine their
effect on desegregation, which is normal procedure in desegregation lawsuits.
DOJ is merely saying, then, that White must follow the law.

Why are the false claims of Jindal, White and other Republican
leaders the ultimate hypocrisy?

Because attorneys for Superintendent of Education JohnWhite went
to Federal Court on June 13th seeking to block low-income African-American
families from exercising parental choice in St. Helena Parish (Louisiana has
Parishes instead of Counties), one of the lowest-income districts in the state.
White asked the Court to deny
choice to those parents who wanted their children out of his "Recovery School
District" Middle School. Why?
According to White's filing:
"This court should consider St. Helena’s request
looking at it from the desegregation
mindset." And then:
"If St. Helena is allowed to add additional grades to its elementary
school and high school that could
possibly create a greater desegregation issue rather than helping to remedy
the one at hand."

Governor Bobby Jindal,
Superintendent John White, and Republican leaders are attacking the United
States Department of Justice across the country for merely asking that John White
be ordered to abide by desegregation orders. The U.S. DOJ is specifically NOT denying
choice to any parents. SuperintendentJohn White,
on the other hand, is actually using a desegregation case to deny parents in
St. Helena Parish any school choice. This is hypocrisy run amok.

Monday, June 10, 2013

When I competed in the NATO Swimming and Diving Competition
in Sindelfingen, Germany in the early 1980's I wrote to my future bride about
my amazing accomplishments. I was totally honest about my achievements… and
totally misleading at the same time:these characteristics also describe the nature of the constant battle
between states over their "rankings" in education and student
achievement.

As
a nation we seem to be fascinated with the practice of ranking almost
everything! It seems that every local publication produces their rankings of food
establishments or coffee houses or hamburgers, for example. Nationally we rank
communities on crime, education, "friendliness" and honesty,
pollution, "livability" and almost any other measure you can imagine!
At the same time, however, it is abundantly clear that such measures often
project a measure of precision that is patently absurd.

For
the record, in the 10 Meter Platform Diving event I achieved Third Place, and
in the 1 Meter Diving Competition I received Fifth Place. The statements are a
bit misleading, however. When asked to compete as part of the US Team in this
competition I informed the coach that I really was NOT a good diver, by any
measure! He quietly informed me that my ENTRY into the two diving categories
would earn points for our team, and that he simply had no other divers. This
leads to the misleading part of my accomplishment.I didn't have to actually do ANYTHING other than dive!Unless I was disqualified, I would win
points for my team because there were only going to be two other contestants in
the 10 Meter and 4 other in the 1 Meter classes. I would get points for the
team without really doing anything, although diving from the 10 Meter Platform
was more challenging that I could have imagined! In fact, I was almost
embarrassed to surface after each dive. I placed dead last in both events, but
I survived, and the US team won the overall competition.

What
does this story have to do with the very serious educational "competition"
between states, and within states as well? In much the same way as I was able to win
points for my team by simply taking part in the events, some states are able to
win a high position in state "rankings" on the National Assessment of
educational Progress (NAEP) by simply…being.What do I mean by this?One of the most clearly recognizable patterns we find in
testing is that family income seems to account for a lot! States at the top of
the rankings on NAEP tend to have more wealthy students, and fewer students qualifying
for free meals. Mississippi and
Louisiana share the dubious honor of having the highest percentage of students
in their public schools coming from low-income homes.And both states "bring up the rear" when it
comes to the NAEP rankings. Should anyone really be surprised by this
relationship?

Perhaps
we should ask whether the respective rankings on NAEP actually represent a
measure of the quality of teaching in the states or the quality of the school
boards or some other school-related measure. Or perhaps we should ask whether
the ranking simply corresponds to other measures of the quality of life such
as, well, how about poverty! Louisiana and Mississippi are perennial "bottom
feeders" on national measures of the quality of life of children when it
comes to early childhood measures before these children ever enter the
schoolhouse doors! Why is their no righteous anger when the annual "Kids
Count" report is released by the Annie E. Casey Foundation and Louisiana
is either in last or second to last place in those factors that we know impact our
children's educational attainment and success in later life. As the 2011
report notes on page 24 "Children
who are nurtured and well cared for in the first five years have better social-emotional,
language, and learning outcomes." Does it take a degree in rocket
science to see that how we care for children in their first five years is going
to impact academic achievement for our schools?

We
need to keep in mind one thing, and it is very important in understanding
another problem with the rankings between states on NAEP. The scores and
rankings released annually and debated in the media and in the legislature are based on public schools only. Why is
this important? Private and parochial schools are much less likely to admit students with severe physical, emotional, or
mental handicapping conditions. They are much less likely to admit large numbers of students coming from the
lowest income families. They are much more
likely to use academic achievement tests in their admissions policies than
they are to use "means testing."For this reason, as more and more students in a given area
are admitted to private and parochial schools, the more likely it is that the
public schools in the same area are going to find themselves much lower in
achievement-based rankings than other similar areas without private and
parochial schools. This finding is true of states as well, of course.

It
is for this reason that the ranking of states in the Kids Count report is
even more damning for Louisiana. It reports on factors for all children. Yet those
children that arrive in our public schools throughout Louisiana face challenges
at a significantly higher rate that the Kids Count report suggests, for the higher
percentages of private and parochial schools in Louisiana are skimming off
those students who are likely to have more resources than average, not less.

I
admitted the truth about my diving achievements (pun not intended, but valid) to
my future wife in a letter just a few days after my initial letter. When are
the media and the powerful political "reform" forces in our states
going to "fess up" to the truth about the rankings in education? When
are they going to recognize and admit the truth?

The
measures such as "Letter Grades" and "School Performance
Scores" they are using to "damn" public education in Louisiana
or particular school systems, are not
legitimate rankings, but are instead a rank, odious and misleading set of
measures that are being used to condemn our students, our teachers, and our
communities. These same myths of "failure" based on these rankings
are leading to a future of failed "status quo" reforms that are based
on false premises, and less likely to improve education for all children than
almost any measures recommended by groups like the Annie E. Casey Foundation in
their 2011 Kids Count report:

A vast body of research shows that
high-quality early childhood development programs for disadvantaged children
and their families are one of the most cost-effective investments for reducing
the harmful effects of economic hardship. These programs include an array of
home visiting and parenting support programs for families with infants and
toddlers and comprehensive pre-kindergarten programs for three- and
four-year-olds. (p.24)

Don't
expect to find "charter schools" or "value-added" measures
in the Annie E. Casey report. They aren't there. What is there in the report is
evidence-based findings of researchers drawing from data from around the
country that how we measure student achievement, and rank the states, or
districts around the country is not really
a measureof teaching and
learning in schools, but is instead a measure of who shows up at the public
schools in each state.

Will
you stand up and be counted as one who no longer allows the media and the
"reformers" to damn your schools, and your state, in the interest of
their politics and profit? Get informed! Get involved. Get real! And get ready,
for the rank rankings will continue until we call them out for what they are!
Dive in!

Saturday, June 8, 2013

Most
discussions of "school reform" focus on the need to close or
restructure failing schools or else
provide students with choice as a way
out of them. Embedded within these discussions are theories or suggestions
about why these schools are failing. Often left unexamined is the actual claim
that these schools are failing.

Since
I have had the opportunity to study many schools in Louisiana throughout my
career as a member of the faculty in the College of Education at Louisiana
State University, and through the lens of my service as a School Board Member
for sixteen years, I will focus on schools in Louisiana. When a school in
Louisiana is assigned the letter grade F,
it is almost universally accepted in the media and in school reform policy
debates that children in this school are receiving a sub-standard education,
almost by definition since the school itself is seen as "failing."
Yet the second part of the title of this paper, which comes from a chapter in
the Late Gerald W. Bracey's 2003 book "On the Death of Childhood and the
Destruction of Public Schools," raises an interesting question.

Should
we be confident that the letter grade F
assigned by the State of Louisiana actually indicates that the quality of
teaching in the school is the reason for the failure? If it is not the quality
of teaching, then what is it? After all, it is not the building that is
responsible for the education of the students within its walls.

Drawing
upon research on teaching and learning, and data on student achievement we will
examine how failing schools "fail"
and ask if they indeed are failing. We will also draw from some of the good work
being done in Louisiana to improve the quality of teaching and the quality and
effectiveness of our schools.

The teacher is
the most important factor for school success. "On the job" professional
development and improving working conditions of teachers are the keys to school
improvement.

We
find further support for the role of teaching in failing schools in other places as well. For example, we heard
strong comments from Dr. Tabitha Grossman, Senior Policy Analyst at the National
Governors Association, when she came and spoke before the Blue Ribbon
Commission on Educational Excellence. In her Building
a High Quality Workforce: a governor's guide to human capital development
she begins on page one with this succinct point:

"Teacher effectiveness is the primary
influence on student achievement, followed by principal effectiveness."

She
gives as her reference to this, a Wallace Foundation publication, certainly a
reputable source in many education and policy circles.On page three of the guide, Dr.
Grossman again emphasizes the important role of the teacher in the academic
achievement of students: “Research shows that teacher quality is the primary
influence on student achievement." For her reference for this statement she
uses a major report on teacher quality published by the Organization for
Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).Again, this gives us additional confidence in her statement.

We can
see in these quotes a clear relationship being outlined between "teacher
effectiveness" as the "primary influence" on student
achievement, and the teacher as the "most important single factor"
for student success. Since the letter grade of a school is, for the most part, determined
by "student success" as measured by standardized test scores, the
reformers seem to be on solid ground in assessing the blame for low scores to inferior
teaching. Before we conclude that so many of Louisiana's failing schools are filled with poorly performing teachers,
however, we might want to examine other possible factors that might explain the
low scores in these schools.

If
teaching is key, we should find evidence that quality teaching can reverse the
impact of other factors that might be hindering student achievement in the failing schools. After all, if the
earlier quotes represent the best research on student achievement, that
research certainly suggests that teacher quality is the dominant factor. To
test this, let's see if other factors appear to play a large role in failing schools.

One
claim that we often hear from those challenging the reformers is that poverty
is the reason for failing schools. If poverty is the cause of failing schools, then we should find that strong patterns exist
linking poverty to school performance, even in charter schools and in voucher
programs where reformers claim that competition for school success should help
to overcome any challenges in educating students from low-income homes.

We
will now explore some data to see whether poverty seems to be related to school
failure within Louisiana. To accomplish this we used data on the letter grades
and school poverty that used to be available from the Louisiana Department of
Education's website. An earlier version of this paper had links to all of the
data used in the following examples, but unfortunately, State Superintendent of
Education John White has had nearly all research data sets removed or modified
to ensure that studies such as this cannot now be done. Luckily, this study was
completed before the removal of the historical public data. We removed selective enrollment and alternative schools from the list of
schools in the state containing letter grades and information on student
poverty, since both types of schools obviously start off with students selected
by achievement levels. Dr. George Noell, the architect of the state's
value-added assessment system, has pointed out that prior test scores, where
available, are clearly the most powerful predictors of future achievement, so a
school that selects for high-achieving students or is filled with students
whose academic achievement has been severely hampered before their arrival in
the school would not be giving us legitimate information about the quality of
teaching within the school.

If
teacher quality is the most important factor in student achievement, then we
should find patterns suggesting that high-performing schools such as those with
letter grades of A are overcoming
the impacts of poverty, while those schools labeled F are not as effective in overcoming the challenges of poverty. We
will use the category of students qualifying for free lunch, since that
contains students in families with incomes up to 130% of the poverty line, or
closest to the federal guidelines for poverty.

The
average percentage of students qualifying for free meals in the A schools, is approximately 34%, which
is almost the same as the average percentage of students in all schools across
the United States who qualify for free meals.When we look at schools identified as failing schools, we find much higher levels of poverty. Approximately 89% of the students in
schools rated F qualify for free
meals. Examining schools labeled B
or C or D, we find that they also fit this pattern. We find their respective
percentages of low-income students to be 45%, 60%, and 80%. To make it easier
to visualize this pattern for the state of Louisiana, we have charted it below.

From
this chart it appears that there is a powerful pattern in the relationship between
the concentrations of poverty in schools and the assigned letter grades for schools.
However, we should note that for four years Louisiana put out a report that
highlighted High-Poverty High Performing
Schools, which suggested that there are, perhaps, many schools that defy
this pattern. After carefully examining the lists, which reported higher
numbers of schools each succeeding year, with 56 schools in the 2011 release, we
noted that many of the schools actually had a lower percentage of students
qualifying for free meals than the state average. In addition, most of the
schools were magnet schools or schools where Gifted/Talented programs were
masking lower test scores for other groups of students in the schools. Finally, there were schools like Lake
Forest Elementary, in New Orleans, that had extensive application and testing
procedures that eliminated low-scoring students from the schools.We also noted that there were no
schools that had been on the list every year. Not one school out of over 1300
schools in the state that had overcome the challenges of poverty every year.

The
pattern shown above suggests, in fact, that poverty is playing a very important,
and perhaps dominant role in student achievement. Perhaps Louisiana is the only
state that has these patterns? However, we note similar patterns on the
National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) subject area assessments.
For example, the chart below shows 8th grade reading assessments for public and
for private schools (including religious-affiliated schools). As can be seen in
the chart, family income seems to matter in achievement scores for all schools.
The gaps between those students who DO NOT qualify for free or reduced meal
prices and those who DO qualify for reduced meal prices are 14 points in the
public schools and 18 points in the private schools. The gaps between those who
DO NOT qualify for either free or reduced meal prices and those who qualify for
FREE meals are 25 points for public schools and 26 points for private schools.

On these
NAEP Reading Scores, a 10 to 12 point gain in the scale scores is roughly equal
to a year's gain in achievement. (The numbers you see are called "scale
scores" and are used to enable researchers to more easily compare
achievement across schools and groups and to see differences.) To put this in
the simplest terms, students scoring 10 to 12 points higher than other students
have achievement levels we would expect from those having an extra year of
schooling. This data suggests that students living in families at or near the
poverty level are about two years behind their middle class peers. Clearly
then, poverty seems to greatly affect student achievement in public and in
private schools. We note that although the private schools seem to have an
advantage on the scores, they enroll very few special education students, and they
get to select their students.

We
also explored data in districts across the country that have had charter
schools as well as voucher programs and other common school reforms in place for
a number of years. We again looked at NAEP scores in order to see what kind of
impact these reforms have had on reversing the apparent relationship between poverty
and student achievement.

NAEP
scores can be useful checks against a natural tendency of states, districts,
and schools to focus on teaching to the
test, because NAEP assessments are much more difficult to game or teach to than state level tests. An example of this can be found in
states where 90 percent or more of students receive passing scores in their
state at the basic level, when only 20 or 30 percent of their students are
passing NAEP at the Basic Level. We note that the Proficient Level of NAEP is
not at all equal to what we might assume is being on grade level, but is instead significantly higher.

Cleveland,
Ohio school reformers achieved success at the U.S. Supreme Court in 2002 with a
ruling that vouchers could be used in religious schools. Currently, over 5000 students
in Cleveland attend schools that accept vouchers and most of these students are
attending church-related schools. (Vouchers
are named for the payment vouchers used by families to fund their children's schooling
at private, parochial or other schools outside of existing public school choice
opportunities such as magnet schools. Vouchers should not be confused with
scholarships, which are used to reward merit, or scholarship.) In 2003, right after
vouchers for religious schools were approved to begin, the average 8th grade
NAEP reading assessment scale score in Cleveland was 240 for low-income students.
Eight years later the average score for low-income students remained at 240. We
should note that Cleveland does not have enough students who do not qualify for
either free or reduced meal prices to actually have a published NAEP score for
those students.

In New
York City, where school reformer Chancellor Joel Klein shook up the school system
and radically changed the structure of the nation's largest school system, with
charter schools taking over many existing schools, and also in Chicago, where
current U.S Secretary of Education Arne Duncan used many of the same reforms, score
trends on 8th grade reading were also flat. Average scores for low-income
students from each of these two cities in 2011 straddled the national average
for low-income students. Students in New York City, after years of reform
scored 151, Chicago students scored an average of 149, and the national average
for low-income students is 150. Clearly, the evidence suggests that poverty
matters, and it matters in a powerful and predictable way. In spite of early claims
that teachers in high-profile schools in these cities had reversed the impact
of poverty, closer examination nearly always reveals that the impacts of
poverty certainly remain.

To
show how concentrations of poverty play out for individual schools, researchers
plotted the scores of students at elementary, middle, and high schools in
Ascension Parish, Louisiana (In Louisiana, "parishes" are the
equivalent of "counties" in other states.). Ascension Parish is
useful because the school level data is not affected as much as it is in other
districts by charters and magnet schools that distort the data. You can easily
imagine how a school that selected mostly high-achieving students who also
qualified for free meals would distort patterns of achievement for that school,
as well as other schools around them. (Obviously, there are students from
low-income families who are also extremely high scoring! It is for this reason,
among many others, that low expectations for students are never justified!) For
each level, elementary, middle and high, the straight line on each chart
represents the statistical fit of the relationship between the percent of
students qualifying for free meals and the schools' performance scores. (It is
this School Performance Scores, or SPS, that determines the actual letter grade
of a school.)

It is almost frightening that the
schools were fitting so closely on the line that represented the correlation or relationship between
poverty and school performance scores. There are actually two schools where
both the school performance scores and the corresponding percentages of
low-income students were so nearly identical that they appear over one another
in the chart.

The
pattern for middle schools was even stronger than that for elementary schools
in Ascension, as illustrated on this next chart.

The
powerful relationship between poverty and performance scores in these Middle
Schools is almost beyond description. In statistical terms, the correlation
between the percentage of students eligible for free meals and the school
performance scores for Middle Schools in Ascension was negative .987 which,
simply stated, means that as poverty increased, scores went down, in an almost perfectly
linear relationship.

For the Ascension Parish High Schools the relationship was as perfect as most of us have
ever seen. The incredibly powerful numerical correlation of -.998 once again
suggested that the percentage of free lunch eligible students in a school could
easily be used to fairly accurately predict the school performance scores of a
school.

These
charts can be incredibly powerful in helping us visualize the degree to which
poverty matters. In school districts where there were schools that had a group
of "gifted" or "talented" students, or where there were
minimum requirements to get into the school, such as the Baton Rouge Foreign
Language Academic Immersion Magnet (Baton Rouge FLAIM), we almost always found
these schools to be above the line, meaning they achieved at a higher level
than their free lunch percentages would have predicted, for obvious reasons.
Conversely, schools that dealt with high concentrations of students who had not
been achieving well on standardized tests in the high-stakes world of
"reformy" Louisiana, and who often directed their frustration in
socially unacceptable ways, were almost always below the line. Schools with
high concentrations of students qualifying for special services due to mental,
physical, or emotional handicapping conditions almost always lie below the
line.

In
examining District Performance Scores (DPS) across Louisiana, we notice the
same patterns. The DPS scores are, like SPS, mostly influenced by student
achievement on standardized tests. Zachary, with the lowest percentage of
students qualifying for free meals in the entire state, had the highest DPS. On
the other end of the spectrum, the Recovery School District and St. Helena
Parish have the two lowest DPS scores, with St. Helena having the highest
percentages of students qualifying for free meals.

The strong
nature of the relationships we found yet again convinced us that we needed to seriously
question the statements we quoted earlier in this paper about the powerful
effects of teachers on student academic achievement.When we went to the original sources of the texts used by
Tabitha Grossman, for example, we discovered that her statements were not
consistent with the statements in the documents she referenced.

Dr.
Grossman wrote: "Teacher effectiveness is the primary influence on student achievement,
followed by principal effectiveness." The Wallace Foundation research report she referenced actually said: "Teachers have the most immediate in-school
effect on student success." We trust you can note the not so
subtle-difference. "In-school" and "immediate" do not necessarily
equate to "primary influence."

What about her other quote: "Research shows
that teacher quality is the primary influence on student achievement."When we went to the OECD report she referenced, this is what we found:

Three broad conclusions emerge from
research on student learning. The first and most solidly based finding is
that the largest source of variation in student learning is attributable to
differences in what students bring to school – their abilities and attitudes,
and family and community background. Such factors are difficult for
policy makers to influence, at least in the short-run. (Emphasis added)

The second broad
conclusion is that of those variables that are potentially open to policy
influence, factors to do with teachers and teaching are the most important
influences on student learning. In particular, the broad consensus is that
“teacher quality” is the single most important school variable
influencing student achievement. (Emphasis added.)

The
OECD report and the earlier report from the Wallace Foundation suggest that
teacher effectiveness is important, but they are clearly not reporting that
among all factors impacting student achievement, that teacher impacts are the
most important.In fact, the OECD
report is quite explicit on this.

If
researchers can use rates of poverty, independent of any knowledge of actual
teacher and teaching quality, to predict school performance scores, what does
this say about the claims of reformers that it is the teaching in the schools
that is deficient?What it
suggests is the need to ask the question in the second part of the title of
this paper.What if failing
schools… aren't?

Policy
makers in Louisiana, and in other states, have suggested that value-added
measures (VAM) be used to explore the actual impact of teachers on student
achievement. Supporters often use the following argument to suggest that this
complex mathematical procedure is necessary because it would be ridiculous to
use the actual test scores of students. "Think about it" they say. "Would
anyone want to teach the students who have the most challenges to overcome, and
who score the lowest on nearly all standardized tests?" Teachers might
only want to teach advanced students, or gifted students."Obviously" they say, this
would not be "fair." How is it "fair" to not account for
these challenges when measuring "school performance?"How is it "fair" to condemn
schools as failing when the accountability system is so flawed that it does not
even begin to measure the quality of teaching within the schools?

I
believe the data and arguments presented in this paper make clear that many schools
are being unfairly stigmatized with the label of failing. More to the point, it suggests, very strongly, that the
letter grades themselves seem to have no particular value in predicting the
quality of teaching within schools! I recently tweeted that "You can know
nothing about the quality of teaching in a school by looking at the school's
letter grade." To put it bluntly, the evidence suggests that school
performance scores are clearly and powerfully related to the degree of poverty
in the schools. I believe that there are likely to be some schools that have
excellent teaching faculties, and some schools that do not have such a strong
teaching faculty. I also believe the data suggest that neither the School
Performance Scores nor the "transparent" Letter Grades are useful in
determining which schools have which faculties.

Wonderful
schools which are nearly filled to overflowing with students struggling from
the negative impacts of poverty do not deserve to be automatically labeled as failing schools by anyone who has not
carefully, and honestly, examined the teaching going on within their walls.

Parents,
teachers, students and even school reformers perhaps, can fairly make
determinations of whether a particular classroom is conducive to learning. It
may take multiple observations and interactions with the teacher and the
students, but fair and accurate evaluations of the quality of teaching can, and
should be made. School reformers often seem to know numbers, but don't always
appear to know what those numbers actually represent, or if they represent
anything at all. I argue here and now, stridently and with the support of
incredibly powerful data, that to label a school as failing based on the scores of students in the school, without
taking into account factors that Dr. George Noell, the Wallace Foundation, and
the OECD and others have clearly suggested impact student achievement
independent of the classroom teachers, is neither ethically nor morally
defensible!

Our
current accountability system for schools does nothing to account for the
effects of poverty on students in our schools, and the challenges it represents
to those teaching and learning in these schools. Louisiana's accountability system
does not, in any way, account for the incredibly varied abilities students
bring with them when they first arrive at our schools. The current system fails
to recognize evidence such as Kindergarten inventories that clearly point out
the effects poverty has had on children before entering school.The work of Dr. Noell and others who
point out that these scores are powerful predictors of future performance, and
would provide evidence of the extremely difficult challenges faced by
high-poverty schools, is totally ignored.

Recognizing
poverty, and the incredibly powerful effects it has on student achievement in
our schools, especially prior to students even entering Kindergarten, would
provide increased support for initiatives that have incredibly powerful and
proven effects on student performance. Community programs that focus on
pediatric care or parenting awareness programs are not as strong as they need
to be in a state where children rank last in virtually all early-childhood categories
on comparisons across all states. The number of books in the home, and the
hours of television watched might become topics of conversation in a community
seeking to increase the education quality of the entire community.

The
current accountability system labels schools as failing in spite of no evidence that it is the teaching that is
failing. The labeling is done on the basis of test scores alone, which have
more to do with the incredible poverty faced by the students than with any
evidence of poor teaching. When so many high-poverty schools across the state
receive the Letter Grade F, it has
the effect of eroding public confidence and desperately needed community
support for our neediest public schools, yet the grades are assigned by
computer, with no one going to the schools to actually see what is happening in
the classrooms! This does a great disservice
to teachers, to students, and to parents who more than anything else, simply
want to have their children in schools where teachers meet their children where
they are, and then teach their children well.

The
real choices to be made, then, are perhaps not the "choices" promoted
by reformers who often see profits in the condemning of public schools.
Instead, a more important and meaningful choice is whether we choose to do
something about the failure of our accountability system to fairly and
accurately provide parents and communities with useful information about the
quality of our public schools.

The
important question, for now, is whether we will have the moral and political
courage to stop falsely labeling schools as failing,
with all of the negative consequences such a label carries, absent real and
convincing evidence concerning the quality of teaching within the school. The
thousands of dedicated teachers and administrators in our schools deserve better,
and the hundreds of thousands of students certainly deserve nothing less!

I used
the term "failing schools"
in this paper over a dozen times, and chances are you didn't stumble over the
term, since we have heard it so many times. I believe that we should banish the
use of this term in the media, and in our policy debates, until the reformers
can assure the public that they ONLY mean those schools that are actually
failing to provide quality instruction for student, and not simply those who
face incredible challenges, and in spite of those overwhelming challenges
provide excellent opportunities to learn for all children.

This
paper is the first in a series which will begin to offer an alternative vision
of the very real choices Louisiana can make as it moves beyond its bicentennial
as a state. Will we make the hard choices, that require more than the labeling
and blaming of schools for the challenges we face?I believe we must. I thank you for reading this, and I
welcome your comments and your suggestions for ways we can further inform the
future of education.

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About Me

I was born and raised in Louisiana, and have traveled extensively, compliments of Uncle Sam (I served in the U.S. Army in Central America, Europe, and in the US).
I received my BS in Business Management (summa cum laude, which my dad said must be Latin for "some come late" since it took me so long to get my degree) from University of Maryland after coursework at colleges and universities on three continents (Uncle Sam likes to move us soldiers often!), and went on to receive my Masters and my Certificate Of Education Specialist from Louisiana State University, where I am ABD.
I have worked in a variety of positions over the years, and have retired from my job teaching and research as a member of the faculty of the College of Education at Louisiana State University. In addition to my research and teaching at LSU, I also served 16 years as an elected member of the East Baton Rouge Parish School Board. I also served as the President of the Louisiana School Boards Association.
My wife and I have two kids, both of whom graduated from our local school system, and both of whom are involved in teaching and coaching!